The WAP Forum, the multivendor group setting standards for the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), announced the release of WAP 2.0 for public review.

The next generation of WAP will support the W3C XHTML and CSS Recommendations, lowering costs for developers working to target multiple platforms. Widely criticised for tweaking and replicating rather than embracing existing standards, WAP 2.0 takes steps to rectify this fault, including adopting the IETF's HTTP/1.1 and TLS.

Other new features in the 2.0 release include synchronization features (using SyncML), a "persistent storage interface" for accessing and storing data on the remote device, and support for multimedia.

WAP documents are unfortunately only available as PDFs.

• WAP 2.0 press release (PDF)
• Specification list